property, I suppose. He divided it equally between her and Aunt
Eunice."

"Well, we just haven't!" Alec exclaimed. "That was spent before we
came here, and nearly all of Aunt Eunice's share, too. She's been
drawing right out of the principal the last two years so that she
could keep us in school, and there's hardly anything left but this
old house and the ground it stands on. She never told me until this
summer. That's why I took the first job that offered, and drove
Murray's delivery wagon till the regular driver was well. It wasn't
particularly good pay, but it paid for my board and kept me from
feeling that I was a burden on Aunt Eunice.

"I was sure of getting that position in the bank. One of the
directors had as good as promised it to me. While it wouldn't have
paid much at first, it would have been an entering wedge, and have
put me in the direct line of promotion. And you know that from the
time I was Macklin's age it has been my ambition to be a banker like
grandfather. Since I failed to get that, nobody, not even Aunt
Eunice, knows how hard I've tried to get into some steady,
good-paying job. I've been to every business man in the village, and
done everything a fellow could do, seems to me, but in a little place
like this there's absolutely no opening unless somebody dies. The
good places are already filled by reliable, middle-aged men who have
grown up in them. There's no use trying any longer. Every time I get
my hopes up it's only to have them dashed to pieces--shipwrecked, you
might say."

He paused a minute, ostensibly to give his chin a fresh coating of
lather, but in reality to gather courage for the words he found so
difficult to say. In the silence, Macklin's voice came floating up to
them from the porch below. Sitting on the steps in the twilight, with
his bare feet doubled under him, he was reciting something to his
Aunt Eunice in a high, sturdy voice. It came in shrilly through the
open window of Alec's room, where the brown shade and overhanging
muslin curtains flapped back and forth in the evening breeze.

Philippa smiled as she listened. He was reciting a poem that Aunt
Eunice had taught each of them in turn, after the Creed and the
Commandments and the Catechism. It was Whittier's hymn--"The Eternal
Goodness." She had paid them a penny a stanza for learning it, and as
there are twenty-two stanzas in all, Philippa remembered how rich she
felt the day she dropped the last copper down the ch